James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal wrote his last column of 2015 on a John Kerry profile by New Yorker editor David Remnick, and a Rolling Stone interview with Kerry. He found this exchange with Jeff Goodell in the aging-hippie magazine “unhinged” in tone:
Q: Given your characterization of climate change as a national-security threat, when you look at what the Koch brothers and Exxon Mobil are doing—as you know, Exxon Mobil is being investigated by the New York state attorney general for lying to investors about what it knew about climate change.
Kerry: Absolutely. It’s tobacco—it’s R.J. Reynolds all over again.
Q: Given what’s at stake, do you consider Exxon Mobil or the Koch brothers an enemy of the state?
Kerry: Well, I’ll leave it to other people to assign metaphors or allegories. I would prefer to try to build the consensus necessary, and we don’t get there if we start accusing people of things. So we need to try to bring people into an understanding. I don’t think we’re going to do it with the Koch brothers. But I think that Exxon Mobil stands potentially to lose billions of dollars in what I would imagine would be one of the largest class-action lawsuits in history.
WNU Editor: If a Republican official said the same thing .... without denouncing the premise of the question .... the media would be in a frenzy right now. Instead .... this is buried in a news website that examines media bias. The Rolling Stone interview is here .... John Kerry on Climate Change: The Fight of Our Time (Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone). Sighhh .... I left the Soviet Union because of this mindset .... but it appears that this mindset exists among many in Washington.
Update: Someone has just emailed me that Rush Limbaugh has said the same thing.
1 comment:
the blatant use of executive power has been on the rise for a long freaking time now. given that the current administration has had such a powerful ally in the dc media to effectively propagate the now extra-massive list of criminal offences that now litter its political landscape, it should be of no surprise to anyone with a pair of eyes and perhaps a slightly functioning brain to see that these inconsistencies are merely the tip of the iceberg in the continual erosion and deconstruction of the constitutional laws established back when life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness actually meant something to those in power.
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